


The Waking

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 15:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16579295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: You dream your soulmate's dreams, Boyd's mama explains, rocking him to quiet his tears.





	The Waking

**Author's Note:**

> So this AU is from ohana on tumblr, who [suggested](https://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/178828669433/soulmates-au-im-not-a-big-fan-of-soulmates-au) that whatever you dream, your soulmate dreams, too. I have altered this (though not on purpose, I just forgot) to whatever you would dream, your soulmate dreams instead. The title (and a quote Boyd uses at the end) are taken from Theodore Roethke's poem, [The Waking](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43333/the-waking-56d2220f25315). This diverges in episode 1.08 when Boyd gets released from prison. The plots of several children's books are also stolen, feel free to ask me which ones, or to come suggest other things on tumblr!

Boyd dreams of boots thudding over the old wood of a porch, the squeal of a screen door. He wakes up already sobbing, screaming for his mama to come for him. His mama always asks what he saw, and Boyd wraps his arms around her neck and buries his tears in her shoulder. There’s never anyone there, in the dreams. Just somebody who’s coming, somebody Boyd don’t ever want to see.

Arlo comes to visit Bo at the house when Boyd is two, his shitkicker boots thudding across the Crowder porch. None of the adults understand why Boyd bursts into tears, why he goes running from the room whenever Arlo comes in.

The dreams change, as Boyd grows older. Sometimes he’s playing with other kids his age at the park, but the wind’s blowing and it’s cold and whenever he looks up he can see dark clouds rolling in to cover the sun. Sometimes there’s a woman singing, and it’s warm and safe and Boyd wakes up humming a lullaby his mama doesn’t sing, uses the song to chase away the scared feeling crawling through his belly, growing arms and legs and hanging on.

He stops crying, though. Bo don’t much care for the idea of having a crybaby for a son, tells him so whenever the dreams are too much to bear. Boyd learns to stuff the sheet in his mouth and wake up quiet, learns to wrap his arms around himself instead of calling for his mama to come.

He wonders about the other little boy, the one who’s stolen Boyd’s dreams. “It’s probably a little girl,” Boyd’s mama tells him, but Boyd knows it ain’t. Little girls are gross, and Boyd wouldn’t be having any of their dreams.

“You think he’s scared all the time?” he asks his mama, while they chop vegetables for chicken and dumplings. “You think that’s why it’s in his dreams?”

“I don’t know, darling,” she tells him, measuring out flour for the dough. Then she glances up and takes a long look at her son’s drawn face. “I mean, of course he ain’t.” She reaches out a floury hand and brushes Boyd’s hair off his forehead, cups his cheek and smiles at him. Boyd hums the lullaby from his dreams, smiles back at his mama and feels his breath come easier in his chest. “He can’t be scared all the time, baby. After all, he’s having your good dreams.”

Boyd works hard to have good dreams, after that, though it’s hard to tell since he ain’t the one who gets to see them. He tries to go to bed smiling, even when dread curls up in his stomach because he knows what’s coming.

He doesn’t tell Bowman about the dreams, because Bowman is little and too stupid to have a soulmate at all. He doesn’t tell his daddy, because his daddy ain’t interested in dreams. He stops telling his mama, after a while, because the dreams seem to make her sad. “Your soulmate has a hard life ahead of them,” she says, running her fingers through Boyd’s hair and singing him to sleep. “It’s a good thing they’ve got your dreams to carry them through.”

He tells Raylan, because there ain’t nobody else to tell, and Boyd is bursting at the seams with dreams about swings and footsteps and this newest dream, where there’s a woman screaming in another room but Boyd can’t move at all, can’t wiggle his toes or move his arms or run to help her. There’s a man laughing, too, low and mean like Bowman after he bites somebody’s arm, and Boyd wants to run—he ain’t sure if he wants to run and help the woman, or if he wants to run out the door—but he can’t move.

“It’s just a stupid dream,” Raylan says, once Boyd’s finished describing it and gotten them both put in time out for talking during a math test and held Raylan’s arms tight to his sides and stood on his toes so he’d know how it feels when you _can’t move_. “You can move just fine, Boyd.”

“Not in the dream, I can’t!” Boyd puts his fists on his hips. “And I ain’t even told you about the dream with the storm.” Raylan doesn’t like thunderstorms, Boyd knows, because sometimes Raylan spends the night, and he always makes them go inside when a storm blows in, even though Boyd likes to stand outside and catch the rain on his tongue, likes to watch the lightning and count the seconds until the thunder comes.

So he tells Raylan about the storm dream, and the teacher threatens to tell their parents because you aren’t supposed to talk during time out. Boyd’s never been very good at following that particular rule.

“What are your dreams about?” he asks Raylan, once they’re out of time out and packed up and shuffled onto the bus home. Raylan shrugs, and Boyd presses, because he don’t care for the idea that Raylan has pieces to him that Boyd don’t know. Raylan ain’t allowed to have secrets from Boyd.

“Just … stuff,” he says finally. “There’s one where we live up in Nobles Holler, I think, and farm, and I have a dog.” Boyd nods, eager to keep Raylan talking, wants to hear about each and every dream that Raylan’s ever had. “There’s another one where I’m training coonhounds.”

“Jeez, Raylan, are all your dreams about dogs?” Boyd can’t help interrupting to ask.

Raylan shrugs again. “I guess my soulmate must want a dog,” he says, and Boyd thinks maybe that’s fair, because Boyd wants a dog, too, but Daddy says they ain’t got any use for something that don’t do nothing but bark and shit in the yard. Crowders have guns, Daddy says, and they don’t need any goddamned dogs. “There’s also the one where I run away from home and wind up staying somewhere with a lot of statues.”

“Like a park?” Boyd says, thinking of the soldier statues with the wreaths on holidays.

Raylan shakes his head. “Like a museum,” he says, because they’ve both read about museums, even if they’ve never been. “Like in that book we read, that Mr. Crowder brought in the bookmobile last month. You know? The one with the two kids and the statue.”

Boyd nods. He remembers that one. He took it home and read it before bed, hoping it would bring his soulmate good dreams. Boyd does that with lots of books—but he always reads the endings first, just to be sure the book won’t give his soulmate nightmares instead.

“Mama says my soulmate’s life is hard,” Boyd tells Raylan quietly, both of them flung into the air for a moment as the bus goes over a bump. “That’s why they have such bad dreams.”

Raylan makes a face. “Those ain’t so bad,” he says, looking out the window instead of looking at Boyd. Boyd pokes him, hard, to get Raylan to peer back over at his face. “They’re just dreams, Boyd. Nothing bad happens, except for you not being able to move, and you always wake up.”

Boyd don’t much appreciate Raylan dismissing his soulmate’s dreams as “just dreams,” but when he has trouble falling asleep at night—doesn’t want to hear those footsteps on the porch, again, doesn’t want to sit frozen and alone in his chair—he tells himself, “you always wake up,” and it helps to hear it said in Raylan’s matter of fact voice.

Sometimes Boyd dreams of running away, taking off with nothing through familiar woods, running until his legs ache and his lungs feel like to collapse in his chest. He wakes up smiling, then, because whatever’s chasing him didn’t catch him that time. Because running in his dreams is the freest Boyd’s ever felt.

Boyd never drops the habit of reading books before bed, and he never drops the habit of pestering Raylan to hear all about Raylan’s soulmate’s intricate, elaborate dreams. Raylan dreams of Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians and Boyd looks at _Gulliver’s Travels_ tucked under his pillow and he wonders. Arlo sends Raylan to school with a broken arm—not his throwing arm, Raylan says, and sounds relieved, instead of furious and raging with the injustice of it the way Boyd is. Boyd goes to sleep that night and dreams of storms with lightning that sets fire to the sky, wind strong enough to blow the roof off a house. He wakes up, and he wonders.

They start at the mines, after school. It’s Boyd’s idea, of course. Raylan bucked and bridled every step of the way, but that baseball scholarship had never come through, and what else was there for two poor boys with second-hand jeans and crooked names? Bo offered to take them on as protection detail, and Boyd knew he had to get Raylan into the mines before Raylan picked up another baseball bat and swung his whole life away.

It doesn’t make it any better, when Boyd starts dreaming of being trapped in the dark, walls closing in on each side and the smell of firedamp so thick he wakes up gasping for air. He still dreams of running through the woods, sometimes, running flat out until the woods break open to the mountain top, until he’s reached the summit and his legs give way, leave him panting on his knees and free as a bird must feel, winging its way unfettered through the sky.

The mine collapses and it’s so much like Boyd’s dream—his soulmate’s dream, _Raylan’s_ dream—that Boyd freezes, feels his throat tighten and his lungs scream for air that isn’t there, feels the walls caving in. It’s like all the dreams come true at once, and Boyd can’t move. Raylan grabs his hand, then. Raylan grabs his hand and pulls Boyd loose of the dream and pulls them toward the tunnel until Boyd overtakes him, running flat out until they break free of the mountain.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep that night, doesn’t want to relive the collapse the way he knows he’s going to, doesn’t particularly want to let go of Raylan’s hand, though Boyd learned long ago that only pussies need comforting from their dreams.

“Go to sleep, Boyd,” Raylan tells him gruffly, but there’s a smile on his face, and even in the dark his gaze is fond. They’re out in one of the empty meadows they found in high school, bedding down in the back of Boyd’s truck because after the collapse neither of them seemed ready to go home. “Sweet dreams.”

So Boyd goes to sleep, because he never was very good at denying Raylan. He goes to sleep and he dreams of a bright sun and clear, blue skies. He dreams that he’s a bird, soaring over the hills, lord over all he sees. He dreams of freedom.

He wakes up to find Raylan watching him, curled in his sleeping bag, one arm tucked under his head, hair fluffed up and flat on one side. Raylan gazes at Boyd like he did in class, sometimes, or after school when Boyd followed him to baseball practice instead of going home, or when he acquiesced to Boyd’s foolhardy plan to send them both into a mine.

“Come with me?” Raylan whispers, asks like he knows the answer, stretches out his free hand like he wants to catch hold of Boyd. Boyd never should have let go. He should have realized, with all those dreams about running, he should have known years ago that Raylan wouldn’t –

Boyd wakes up to find Raylan already gone.

 

He reads the saddest, bloodiest, most tragic books he can find, after that, reads them until he falls asleep on the pages, reads them through boot camp and into a war. He hopes that, wherever he is, Raylan’s having terrible dreams.

In return, Boyd dreams of flying, when he’s not dreaming of running through the woods, chased by something he doesn’t dare look behind him to name.

He hopes Raylan’s reliving Hamlet’s bloody end.

Twenty years of dreams go by, good ones and bad ones, bright ones and bloody ones, a few where Boyd wakes up with the sheet stuffed in his mouth to hold back the scream. Twenty years go by, and then Boyd dreams something he hasn’t in years, trapped in his chair and listening to a woman scream, listening to a man’s nasty laugh and unable to move.

The next day Raylan comes to Harlan. Boyd strides out to meet him, wonders if Raylan’s been dreaming of bank robberies and Emulex, wonders at how little Raylan’s changed in twenty years.

Boyd gets himself shot, and his dreams are a haze of opiates and _hurt_ , but he thinks he dreams of blood under his hands and tears in his eyes and his throat too tight to scream the way he wants to, to let out the unbearable pressure building in his chest.

“Did you miss on purpose?” Boyd asks, and he’s fairly certain that Raylan lies, because that night he dreams in swirls of light, soft and amorphous dreams filled with a million different stars, laying in what might be the bed of a truck, holding on to someone’s hand.

So Boyd edges toward that light, cooperates with Raylan, doesn’t rejoin the prison gang he’d taken up with his first time inside. And Raylan smiles at him, and Boyd dreams of flying, and he wonders how long Raylan’s known.

“Tell me about your dreams,” he demands, the next time Raylan comes to visit, ostensibly seeking information, but unwilling to hang up the phone once Boyd’s told him what he needs to know. Raylan shrugs, and Boyd presses, because it’s Raylan and so Boyd has to know.

“They’ve been pretty lackluster, recently,” Raylan says, raising one eyebrow, his eyes twinkling as he looks at Boyd. “I suppose my soulmate isn’t keeping up with their reading like they used to.”

“Maybe that’s beyond his control,” Boyd replies, and the next time Raylan visits he brings a box full of books he says he got for a dollar at the used bookstore.

Boyd gets out of prison and Raylan’s there waiting, and Boyd’s daddy is waiting. And Raylan doesn’t say it, but Boyd thinks about Raylan stretching out his hand, thinks of _Come with me?_ and turns away from his daddy to ask Raylan for a ride.

“Where are you headed?” Raylan wonders, twirling his keys around his finger, and Boyd thinks of running through the woods to the mountaintop, outrunning all the things that have been chasing him his whole life.

He shrugs. “I suppose I ought to pick up some new reading material, to enliven my soulmate’s dreams. And then I thought – Well, Raylan, I thought …”

Raylan nods like Boyd’s making any sense at all, smiles a little at the steering wheel. “Yeah,” he replies, pulling out of the prison parking lot. “All right.”

That night Boyd dreams of flying through clear, blue skies, taking wing into the breeze and never needing to land. He wakes up with his hand in Raylan’s, Raylan watching him from across the bed, gazing at Boyd like he used to sometimes.

“How’d you sleep?” Raylan asks, and Boyd grins.

“Why, Raylan,” he says, rolling closer. He doesn’t let go of Raylan’s hand. “How do I know that I don’t wake to sleep?” Raylan rolls his eyes and opens his mouth to say something disparaging, no doubt, but Boyd continues on before he can. “And if I take my waking slow,” he adds. “Well, then, I believe this is the best dream I’ve ever had.”

Raylan’s mouth curls into a quiet smile, and he leans toward Boyd and – well, the dream only gets better from there.


End file.
